Marshall Goldsmith was a pioneer of 360 Degree Feedback as a leadership tool. You see leaders, like you, are often so powerful in casting your spell, your message, or your vision upon those who work for you or those closest to you, that it is not in their interest to challenge you. They may be frightened to do so, or they may feel that their job or contract with you is at risk in challenging the status quo. So long as leaders exist in this world, so will this problem. So, why do you think the likes of Jack Welch hires people like Marshall Goldsmith? Because no one else has the guts to tell him what he needs to hear. The Welches of this world know this, and hire accordingly.

Listen to this story of woe to go from one of my clients.

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If you are like me, you have been taught, mentored and coached, you name it, by a few over the years. But the best mentors will have one thing in common – they all have powerful visions for their life. Some even have that thing called a BHAG (google it). All good – cool – excellent – for THEM – and if you had heeded their advice – well good on YOU. But if you think that investors have time to listen to your passionate story around why you need to solve the global climate crisis or some other low probability outcome, they just don’t care.

Why do I say this? [Read more...]

I was contacted by a journalist today who asked me a couple of interesting questions that are worth sharing. He asked me – “Why are entrepreneurs not getting funded for their early stage businesses or ideas?”  I gave him 3 reasons – not exhaustive – but 3 reasons worth sharing.  But I warn you, you may not like them!

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As an early stage entrepreneur, you have (or should) considered grants as part of mix of what you
can do to get their business funded, but a lot of the time, grants that you may be eligible for
are only able to be assessed formally at some later stage of the development (after seed or
start up funding), for example commercialisation grants come after the development stage
of the technology.

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The late Steve Jobs was inspiring no doubt, but I often use him as an example in my coaching for reasons other than you might think. 

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If you have watched my recent talk at the Strategic Entrepreneur Summit you might recall that I talk in depth about how investors think differently from entrepreneurs.

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I have been working very closely with a mining services business over the last 5 months optimising their business in preparation for capital raising and ultimately for exit of the business owner.

Re-engineering balance sheets and process optimisation, whilst is complex and daunting to some (and darn right boring for others), is a lot more straight forward than it is getting people to adopt new ways of doing things. And one the biggest challenges for my client moving into this new world is getting people to do what he wants them to do – in fact forget new ways of doing things – in reality, you can’t get people to do anything they do not want to, even to just maintain the status quo.

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One of my Capital Raising Coaching Program clients came to see me last week. We had not met before, so a perfect opportunity to simulate an investor pitch.

Armed with all the tools, lingo, frameworks and especially insights to how an investor’s brain thinks and decides, they got straight into the pitch without much time for niceties.

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